Austinvn

[quote who="Yalbik" reply="205" id="2732039"] Quoting enigma691, reply 196 Another game with a inflated review, just starcraft with a facelift, not such a bad thing but did they really need 12years to do it? To be fair, I seem to recall Blizzard releasing a couple of other games between Starcraft 1 and 2. I think one was some sort of monthly pay multiplayer fantasy thing. It's a little like asking...did Stardock really need 16 years to make a

Is the game worth buying now? It depends on you. Do you scoff at artificial "intelligence" and prefer only to crush real humans? Yeah, multiplayer's not implemented yet, come back in a week at the soonest. Do the words "learning curve" make you cringe and go back to playing Tetris? Yeah, you'd better wait another patch or two - Stardock is rapidly addressing the lack of tutorial/documentation/noob help, but it's not quite there yet. Do you expect polished, balanced gam

[quote who="Azoreo" reply="2" id="2731595"]Not much to do with the conversation above, but the naming convention a friend used - when designing new units, was: Peasant (the original start unit) Peasant 1.1 Peasant 1.2 Peasant 1.3 Heh.[/quote] As cool in a geeky way as that is, I go with roman numerals for a slightly less immersion-breaking effect: Peasant III, Peasant IV, etc.

[quote who="db0" reply="44" id="2731618"]Which by itself isn't an issue, as surely enough peasants could take down even a dragon in a theoretical scenario. The issue occurs when the costs of the peasants a far less than the costs which the developers assumed would be required to take down a dragon, or an ogre or whatever. This throws balance out of the airlock. [/quote] True, but there's another problem as well. A group of peasants being able to take down a dragon for less cost i

[quote who="MonkeyMaciek" reply="42" id="2731138"]It's obvious (and not just from here) that serious strategy game players are expert tacticians, who understand and exploit the probability distributions underlying the systems they're interacting with. For a game to satisfy them it needs to be both complex and interesting, but also well balanced and impossible to dominate with a two dimensional strategy.[/quote] This is true, but it's important to note that one doesn't need an understa

[quote who="phazonfreak" reply="18" id="2726832"] Quoting Slainangel52, reply 17 I actually have to play from the cloth map until they fix the performance issues. It's SO much easier to distinguish important things on the cloth map than it is on the 3d one. Perhaps that's why it seemed so simple right off the bat. You know what, I think you have a good point there. I was playing in the 3D view and I also find it difficult to locate important things

The extra stats/equipment options after upgrading have to be bugs, else there's no point in ever creating a custom unit from scratch. [quote quoting="post"]2. Do the Scout Pack and Messenger Pack have any effect other than the extra stats? 3. Is it a feature or a bug that a unit can have more than one pack? [/quote] As far as I know, those two packs are just extra stats - this is really something that needs to be better documented though, as some packs (pi

[quote who="Windexglow" reply="14" id="2724898"]Bohemia Interactive (Arma, Operation Flaspoint, Arma2) has an interesting copy protection called FADE. Basically if the game detects it's running a cracked version it won't tell the end user, instead it will slowly (days, weeks) begin to change things about the game. Accuracy slowly getting worse and worse. Sometimes the player would turn into a bird.[/quote] Yet another example of pirates getting free acc

And so the ever-evolving possibly-sentient AI implements phase 1 of operation "Crush Humanity into the Dust of Oblivion." Frogboy did warn us the AI was going to be improved. [No, but seriously, that has to be a bug.]

[quote who="Slainangel52" reply="21" id="2723887"]While I'm all for making the groups attack multiple times it's going to take a lot more than splitting the attacks to balance it. A few scenarios to consider. You've got a group of 10 guys with 10 attack fighting a dragon with 100 defense and 100 attack. The formula I keep seeing posted for combat is something like. Attack Roll - Defense Roll = damage if > 0 else "Miss" Currently you'd have

[quote who="DragonRider862" reply="14" id="2717801"]This update begs a lot of questions about children. Is the process for having children any different for a female Sovereign as opposed to a male? Is pregnancy represented at all, either for a queen or a king's wife? If a female Sovereign has a child when she's out in the wilderness somewhere, what do you have to do to get it sent somewhere safe? Or do babies not have a physical in-game representation at all until they

[quote who="Mtn_Man" reply="104" id="2716483"]That's just an abstraction. While visually only one guy from each squad is fighting, damage is delivered to the squad as a whole. You can see this in the most recent trailer where a guy swings his sword and the whole defending squad falls over.[/quote] It's like a bad western - hero fires one shot, 5 Indians fall off their horses. Even though it's just a visual abstraction, here's hoping it gets changed by release, looks rather

[quote who="Mobella" reply="7" id="2715825"] Quoting Mtn_Man, reply 5Also consider that this game isn't just about exploring and questing. There is a definite end-game goal of meeting one of the four victory conditions, and you'll be battling against opponents with the same goal, so you won't want to dawdle. not that im terribly concerned, but is there perhaps a "quest mode" that doesnt take into account an endgame? just aimlessly building cities, questing, etc.?[/quote]

As speculative as these threads are I don't usually respond, but I actually have a desktop that's a close equivalent to your (OP's) laptop, so you may find this useful. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 ghz, 2ghz RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3850 (512 memory), Windows XP. This machine can run Beta 4 smoothly in 1280x1024 with high settings (no AA), can't tell you a framerate offhand but no noticeable lag. Of course I get out of memory errors and other random crashes as many do, but we've been told those wil

I was also disappointed by dropping the realtime battles, but I think unit abilities could easily make up for it. The advantage of realtime is being able to smoothly manage a few hundred units charging at each other simultaneously; this is a nightmare if you have to order each individual unit one-by-one in turnbased combat. The advantage to turnbased is being able to micromanage a handful of units that might each have several spells/abilities to pick from, abilities that might need to be time

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="42" id="2708714"]Buying an FPS is really more like buying the visuals and marketing than the actual content. Buying the marketing isn't always a bad thing ... it usually means a robust multi-player, yet just numbers + visuals (without the content) isn't for everyone, including those that prefer strategy games, tactics games (and even simulation games).[/quote] I'm nitpicking, but I'm going to disagree that people buy FPS games just for visuals without worry

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="16" id="2707447"]It's in fact the other way around : once you're wounded your defense is lower, so you will take even more damage in combat In fact it speeds up things.[/quote] Unfortunately, that'd only encourage focus fire - sure the wounded unit is doing half as much damage, discouraging you from wanting to finish him off, but his defenses are half as much too, encouraging you to finish him off since you can do more damage to him than to a full health

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="68" id="2707541"] And this is where we realize how awesome it'd be if Stardock took up Dwarf Fortress.[/quote] I'm sure at least some of the DF fandom would view this in the same light as Stardock getting bought out by EA :P Pretty 3d graphics? Game balance, bug fixes!? A UI that isn't painful to use!!? A whole team of people polishing DF into a finished game - zomg, they're selling out to a [relatively speaking] big

Yeah I certainly don't mind waiting, there are more important things to perfect - such as tactical combat - but it would be a great addition for an expansion, when it comes to that.

Inheritance! Wars of succession! ..ok, ok, saving suggestions for post-release (and/or a song of ice and fire mod).

Lot of great news, particularly glad to hear about: -Spell cast speed determined by wisdom: very nice, sounds like two problems just got fixed at once (lack of use for wisdom+too many spells per combat turn), if the balance works out right. -Spell power scaling with shards you control, yes yes ! Suggested this once or twice myself (as did many others I'm sure, just glad to see it happen). -Recruiting new races through diplomacy - awesome, practical benefits to

[quote who="TheProgress" reply="2" id="2705174"] Quoting astrath, reply 1There will be more with EVERYTHING on release. More bugs and crashes? Oh no [/quote] And more spells cast on the first turn of combat!? No, but seriously - we're told there will be more everything (all features, anyway) come release. What, specifically, that entails is anyone's guess - but hopefully a more fleshed out and gameplay-significant dynasty system, definitely. If they don't have time

[quote who="strawbdragon" reply="11" id="2705719"]Couldn't get rivers working, so Riverrun is Plainsrun at the moment[/quote] Oh, how different it would've been if they didn't need the Twins, because there was no Trident to cross.. I like your Westeros better. ;)

[quote who="CreeDakota" reply="9" id="2705956"]I think we will have to wait and see if the lore of elemental is captivating. At first glance I am a bit meh, but hopefully the campaign will have some interesting characters in it. Personally I have played countless hours of games with the standard Tolkein inspired races and am not close to tired of it. I am sure that early mods will attempt to emulate more traditional Fantasy staples.[/quote] I agree, looking forw

[quote who="LDiCesare" reply="14" id="2704965"]The second one and most important is the forging of magic items. Being able to design your own set of armor, weapon, etc. was just awesome. I see nothing in Elemental that comes close to this. ( Sure, you can design units, but that's not a strong selling point to me, as it makes all races/factions similar with the lack of personalised units like slingers or paladins. When you met halflings, you knew what to expect. When you meet Ta